Truly memorable horror films like "The Innocents" and "Carrie" are scary because they expose demons within -- not the kind that come out during a full moon. In the haunting "A Tale of Two Sisters," director Kim Jee-Woon explores a relationship with the potential to bring out the worst in everyone.

Following the suicide of their mother, two exceptionally close sisters (played by Im Soo-jung and Moon Geun-young) have to contend with a moody stepmom (Yeom Jeong-a) and an ineffectual father. It's deliberately left unclear if the strange things that turn up in the family's dark labyrinth of a house, such as intestines in the bed and fridge, are real or imagined by the girls, who are just back from a hospital stay presumably for mental problems.

The siblings pull you over to their side largely because Im and Moon are likable young actresses who don't overemote or make their characters seem crazy. By contrast, Yeom's stepmother dearest is a loose cannon from the get- go.

Kim, an up-and-coming filmmaker in his native Korea, freely cuts from the past to the present and back again, confident in the audience's ability to sort things out. He creates stunning images ripe with meaning -- for instance a doctor in a white coat washing his hands in a white basin intimates layers of guilt beyond scrubbing up. Splashes of red appear throughout, often turning into a trail of blood. In one inspired moment, the red morphs into a symbol for a first-aid kit, something that every member of the family could use. This tale of two sisters is so bloody good that an American remake already is in the works.

Drama-comedy. Directed by Tsai Ming-Liang. (In Mandarin with English subtitles. Not rated. 81 minutes. At the Roxie.).

Tsai Ming-Liang's films move glacially in a global-warming world -- seems as if everything has to be hot, edgy and fast-cutting, while Tsai's works invite us to take the time to contemplate the issues of the day, which most often involve loneliness and disconnection in an increasingly complex and impersonal world.

In "Goodbye, Dragon Inn," opening today at the Roxie, he has created another idiosyncratic, oddball movie that is both funny and moody. On a lonely, rainy night, an old, run-down theater in Taipei is about to close for good. The movie shown on that last day is King Hu's 1960s martial arts masterpiece "Dragon Gate Inn."

Tsai's film mourns the passing of an era of not only movies and movie stars but also moviegoing. With gargantuan and characterless multiplex theaters swallowing up the business of single-screen neighborhood theaters all over the world, including San Francisco, and the success of the DVD format, we just don't experience movies in the same way.

I quote from James Naremore's film-noir book "More Than Night," in which the film professor and author recalls first becoming enamored of the movies during the 1950s, when "most neighborhoods had second-run or rerelease theaters where the films changed every few days. At such places, moviegoing involved a feeling of circularity and flow; one often entered in the middle of a feature and then stayed to see the short subjects, previews, and the opening one had missed. ... It was not unusual to watch the show in a nonlinear or flashback style." "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" shows what happens when that flow stops. As it begins, a nearly full house is enjoying the early evening show; soon, the film focuses on the late-night showing, the last in the theater's history. There are only a few people there. Most of them are alone. They change seats, leave the theater for various reasons, and return.

What follows is a series of set pieces, most of them both humorous and also a little bit sad. The decrepit theater has leaks; the ticket taker is a shy woman with a clubfoot; a young man can't seem to sit down without another patron sitting right next to him in this almost-empty theater.

The young man takes frequent breaks -- perhaps this is a film he has seen many times before -- and explores the cavernous theater, the storage areas filled with boxes and old posters. He encounters a man smoking a cigarette, who says he is Japanese and that the theater is haunted, then leaves. Strange.

One shot early on hints at what Tsai is getting at -- an old man, sitting next to his young grandchild. You get the feeling the old man has been watching movies all his life, and is passing on his love of movies to the boy, who presumably will go on watching movies the rest of his life (and perhaps "Dragon Gate Inn" will always have a special meaning to him even decades later. May the circle be unbroken).

Tsai is considered a groundbreaking genius in some critical circles and an overrated bore in others (grist for the latter's mill: a five-minute shot of an empty theater). Certainly he is one this generation's most original voices, who raises interesting questions about why lonely people often lead the same kind of lives independent of one another in a technologically advanced but increasingly disconnected world. Now he seems to be expanding these themes to include movies -- an art form that can certainly bind disparate groups or individuals together to "create" a common culture.

In Tsai's previous film, "What Time Is It There?," about a man in Taipei and a woman in Paris who barely know each other but seem to have the same experiences at the same time, the man watches one of his favorite movies, Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows." At the same time, the woman meets a man at a cemetery; it is Jean-Pierre Leaud, now in his 50s, who played the boy in the movie.

In "Goodbye, Dragon Inn," the two old men in the theater turn out to be two of the stars of "Dragon Gate Inn," Shih Chun and Miao Tien (who has been in several of Tsai's films). When they speak at the end of the movie, there is a resigned acceptance that life, and the movies, will go on without them.

Tsai's films are quirky and strange, but ultimately they are universal and touching.

Note: The sound designer is rarely a person you read about in a movie review, but "Goodbye Dragon Inn" benefits enormously from the work of Tang Hsiang-Chu. "Dragon Gate Inn" is shown only in a few scenes, but the movie's wall-to-wall background soundtrack is superbly integrated into the "real-life" scenes, effectively operating as the film's musical score. In a way, it underlines how "cinematic" a movie can sound.- G. Allen Johnson

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